Mario Eskenazi: "To Colau I call her Colei because she is like Milei, but from the left"

BarcelonaOn his WhatsApp he has a portrait of his friend Javi Royo, which is the maximum refinement to which he himself aspires as a designer: a circle and a cigar. And yes, the bald and brilliant –in every sense– head of Mario Eskenazi is usually accentuated by a cigarette that he puffs on in his studio in the Gothic Quarter while he reviews –Banc Sabadell, TMB, Mossos d'Esquadra...– some of his omnipresent projects.

80 years old. But we are not meeting at the pétanque court, but at the studio where he comes every day.

— The only thing I like is working. Facing a problem that needs a graphic solution and going through the whole process to solve it is like an orgasm.

You have worked a lot on designs for Barcelona. Where does this obsession come from?

— I arrived in Barcelona in 1974 and worked for a while with a very good designer, also Argentine, who was here and whose name was Carlos Rolando. I devoured the American magazines I received and thought: how good they are, the Yankees! But he told me: what you see in the magazine you only find in very special stores. On the street, New York is just as ugly as it is here.

Was it an epiphany?

— I was 26 years old and it became my obsession: why can't there be good design on the street? And over time, I started getting commissions: BCNeta, TMB, the Tragaluz group, Banc Sabadell, Barça... I would go out for a walk and I liked knowing that good design could be on the street.

Barcelona, in the 80s, was considered the Mecca of design. Is it still a beautiful city, in that sense?

— Barcelona is the best city. But in terms of design... very mediocre. Still the best in Spain, though.

What happened for this to be this way?

— Populism. The networks. Before, one had to study a lot. The internet has democratized knowledge, but in Spain there is very little culture. Fix it for me a little, because I feel bad, but the truth is that since Charles V, except for some specific moments of improvement, education is not as good as that of the north. And my progressive spirit comes out: the right screws up. Rajoy, Aznar... everything has been regression.

Are there no good designers left?

— I am not saying that there aren't some good designers here, but for the most part, a lot of work is done for social media and what you see is the same as anywhere else. Large studios do very commercial work, following the trend and what Instagram dictates.

He arrived here fleeing from a military dictatorship.

— Yes, I was lucky with my education. Let it be noted that I am not a nationalist of anywhere. A citizen of the world. Or as my mother used to say, país que fueres, haz lo que vieres. At home, education was atheism. My father was Turkish and poor, but since education was free and compulsory, he completed two degrees, one of which was architecture. My mother was a mathematics and physics teacher. My parents were of Jewish origin and we lived in a small city. To the Catholics, we were Jews—and in Argentina, after "Jew" there always follows "of shit"—and to the Jews, we were renegades, which is the worst thing there is.

Perhaps his view of today's Barcelona is influenced by the nostalgia of when he was young.

— It was certainly a party. Once, when one could still stroll along the Rambles, I ran into a group of students who had been my pupils in the Canary Islands. And while chatting, they told me: “Mario, when you came to teach us... you arrived very high!” And yes, I spent the night partying, at festivals, without sleeping... But I am not particularly sociable. A bit of a ladies' man, yes, I had a few girlfriends.

I would like to review logos you have created. Banca Catalana, for example.

— Banc made me think of a percentage symbol. If I joined it with the idea of the four bars for Catalonia, the result was those four unequal, symmetrical, and slanted orange bars, which could make you think of them. Orange, of course, because we were still under the Franco regime and they would in no way have let us put the red bars on a yellow background.

He has here in the studio two miniature Mossos cars, with the line of small squares that identify them, which are also his.

— The police costumes had been made by Toni Miró. Well, the uniforms, but the thing is I can't stand the police, because I'm an anarchist. I understand they have to be there, but it doesn't thrill me. In any case, the idea was to make them a bit friendly, with some squares that could recall the Catalan flag again and simple letters, so that it would be easy to read and not a very tortured typeface.

Banc Sabadell. Another bank, ahem!

— By chance, again! I knew Pep Oliu through his wife, because she had worked at the Summa studio, like me. The entity wanted to start expanding through the south of Spain and planned to use the SolBank brand, the Bank of the Sun. I told them: why don't we keep the name Sabadell? But they told me that the surveys advised against it. That they had a lot of respect for the Catalans and admitted that they worked very well... but that they were not loved in the south.

What logo did he propose?

— A red circle, for the Sun, and the B for Bank. But when I was presenting it to the competition jury, they told me: “We could use it for the Sabadell Group”. And I told them yes, that it just needed its blue color added. And that is how it remained.

And TMB?

— Oh, my anger comes out here. I am a political anarchist and I hate extremism. Things that happen when you have grown up under Perón and his fascination with Mussolini. I hate populism and, secondly, nationalism. I was working on the identity for TMB for twelve years and I enjoyed it very much. Until 2015...

Colau's year.

— I call him Colei, because he is like Milei, but left-wing. And I call him that because my daughters won't let me say what I would feel like saying to him. I know they are different, but populism, both left and right, is ignorance in power. And Colei placed an environmentalist cyclist to run the TMB. Everything that was starting to be implemented was interrupted.

Speak of typography as a template, with the lines that crossed the letters vertically, horizontally and diagonally.

— Exactly, they are the Barcelona grid and they are reminiscent of the markings painted on the ground. In Seoul, they liked them so much that they wanted them for their buses. Damn the politicians. PP, Convergència, Comuns or Socialist... they all sweep things in their own favor. And I have learned this now, at 80 years old. As for the new mayor, I won't even give my opinion. What can we do? That is what I like about the private sector: that at least they take care of it.

Do you consider yourself an artist?

— Clearly, no. I admire artists and I envy them. My best friend is Mariscal and wherever he goes he carries his little notebook and keeps drawing: he doesn't need any commission. It blows my mind. What I do has to be on the street, otherwise, it's of no use to me.